3 Legged Thing Equinox Leo Carbon Fibre Tripod System & AirHed Light

3 Legged Thing Equinox Leo Carbon Fibre Tripod System & AirHed Light

With the arrival of an X-Pro2, lenses and the perfect messenger-style camera bag, my thoughts turned to plugging the gap left by other essentials I have been doing without for far too long – most of all a sturdy but portable tripod for on-location portraiture, cityscapes and time-lapse photography for use in videos.

The folks at 3 Legged Thing recommended their Equinox Leo as the perfect travel and portrait tripod to go with the perfect messenger-style bag, so it was a pleasant surprise when their Australian distributor, PROtog, kindly offered to send up a review loaner.

One of the first images, above, that I made with the 3LT Leo was a good demonstration of the tripod’s many virtues. Sydney Harbour and many of Sydney’s inner city streets are notorious for their high winds and sudden shotgun blasts of air – and they sometimes occur in this suburb far from the inner city.

Sydney’s winds can kill travel tripods

Umbrellas are not the only objects that easily fall victim to our winds. In his 2011 article, ‘Death of a beautiful camera…‘, cinematographer Philip Bloom described how his Panasonic Lumix GH2 and the lightweight travel tripod it was attached to were suddenly blown over a Sydney harbourside barrier into the drink, never to be seen again.

Channel-legged tripods with long, thin leg sections are a reasonably common sight in the streets of Sydney. I would be very reluctant to use DSLRs or larger mirrorless cameras like Fujifilm’s X-Pro and X-T2, or Panasonic’s LumixGX8 and GH4, on tripods like this. Photo Credit: Karin Gottschalk

I had no hesitation in using any camera on the 3 Legged Thing Equinox Leo, from a Fujifilm X100 through the LumixGX8 and GH4 up to a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, even in windy locations like this high footbridge over the Pacific Highway. Photo Credit: Karin Gottschalk

While I have not experienced that kind of loss, I have had big problems with wind-generated vibration while shooting around Sydney’s CBD and even the exact same spot where Mr Bloom suffered his loss.

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